Historian Peter Brown to Give Public Lecture in New Princeton Seminary Library on September 24

Princeton,
NJ, August 21, 2013– Princeton Theological Seminary’s Department of History
and Ecumenics and the new Seminary library will cosponsor a lecture by Dr.
Peter Brown on Tuesday, September 24, 2013, at 7:00 p.m. in the Theron Room of
the new library. Brown, the Rollins Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton
University, will speak on the topic “Alms, Labor, and the ‘Holy Poor’: Early
Monasticism between Syria and Egypt.” The lecture is open to the public free of
charge.

Seminary President M. Craig Barnes will welcome guests and
will introduce Dr. Brown. Following the
lecture there will be refreshments and an opportunity to look around the
library. “We are delighted to welcome Peter Brown,
distinguished historian and good neighbor to the Seminary, as we also welcome
the community to our new library,” Barnes said. “His lecture concerns an
historical era he himself helped define, namely, ‘late antiquity,’ to mark the
crucial transition from early to medieval church history.”

Brown is a renowned scholar and
historian, a graduate of Oxford University, and served on the faculties of the
University of London and the University of California at Berkeley before
joining the Princeton faculty in 1986. His principal concern is the rise of
Christianity and the transition from the ancient to the early medieval world.

Brown is currently working on the
problems of wealth, poverty, and the shift from an ancient to a medieval view
of society.

Among his many honors, Brown is a fellow
of the British Academy, of the Royal Historical Society, and of the American Philosophical
Society. He was awarded the Kluge Prize of the Library of Congress in 2008.

The Seminary’s new library, located on
Mercer Street on the site of the former Speer Library, opened in summer.

For more information on the event, please
contact Dr. Paul Rorem, Princeton Seminary’s Benjamin B. Warfield Professor of
Medieval Church History.

Princeton
Theological Seminary, founded in 1812, is the first seminary established by the
General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. Its mission is to educate leaders
for the church of Jesus Christ worldwide, and its more than 500 students and
11,000 graduates from all fifty states and many nations around the world serve
Christ in churches, schools and universities, healthcare institutions,
nonprofit agencies, initiatives for social justice, mission agencies, and the
emerging ministries of the church in the twenty-first century.